


The Embodied

by CodexOmicron



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Fire Powers, Horror, Minor Original Character(s), Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Robert Smirke's classification never made sense and we all know it, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:22:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29735220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CodexOmicron/pseuds/CodexOmicron
Summary: Statement of 'Charles Kutry,' whose cannibalistic habits are perhaps not as disturbing as his plausible claim to divinity.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	The Embodied

[CLICK]

Statement of one ‘Charles Kutry,’ regarding his life, tendency towards thrill-seeking, and one particular encounter with a few fiery characters. Statement recorded directly by subject… no date given. 

Statement begins.

[TWO CLICKS]

The first thing I should note is that I’ve been going by Charles Kutry for the past year or so, but obviously I will be changing that after I leave this tape with you. Date omitted to not make your job any easier if for some ungodly reason you attempt to track me down. I will say that, yes, all of my assumed identities are puns just as terrible as this one.

So.

Thank you for listening. I…

Actually I don’t know if I should thank you. I’m not sure what your procedures are. Maybe you listen to every nobody who walks off the street with a spooky story. Maybe you’ll chuck this tape into a dingy basement and never listen to it.

It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. I’m not here to be listened to. I’m here to speak. It’s a somewhat novel activity. I’ve entertained interpersonal relationships before, of course, but… for obvious reasons my discussions tend to be superficial and filled with omissions. So this - opening up about what I am, what I was and dread to become again, what I do - it’s a first for me. But I’ll try anything once. So here I am.

I suppose I’m dallying. I shouldn’t bury the lede: I eat people. I want to be upfront about this.

I… actually don’t know if I pronounced that right. English isn’t my first language. Leed? Led? Leh-deh? Maybe lee-dee, like Lethe. That would explain the, ah, haze of memories.

I hate it. Not the word lede, I mean - and definitely not eating people. I mean burying. I hate being buried. 

Like I told you, I’ll try anything once. And ordinarily I love… constriction. There is something raw, visceral, potent, it being physically restricted and struggling against my prison. I am… not what you would call feeble, and so it’s always kind of a dare, an open question. Will the rope snap under my strength, letting me glory in my freedom and strength? Or will the chain hold, giving me an unmovable object against which to pit all my power until I feel the blessed, calming pangs of exhaustion?

So eventually I decided to try burying myself alive. To test myself against the very earth. It was… a mistake, to put it bluntly. There is an artificiality to ropes and shackles that soil doesn’t have. It is more… primeval. Sorry, it’s pronounced ‘prime-evil,’ isn’t it? Appropriate, I suppose. My point is, the earth has an [i]intentionality[/i] to it that I became keenly, horrifyingly aware of the moment James threw the last shovelful of soil on my face. At first it was fine - the way individual patches of dirt would shuffle and move easily with each twitch of my limbs, and yet the vast mass of it would resist any effort to lift it, was quite novel and fascinating. The way it choked my throat split my mind like a knife’s edge - the part of me that apes humanity desperately sought to breathe, while the lower foundation of my being knew air was a luxury to be appreciated, not an inherent need. After all I could feel all around me the teeming life of worms and roots, slowly cradling my entombed body. 

It was when the dirt covered my eyes and cast me wholly in darkness that I suddenly became blindingly, crushingly aware of the will that surrounded me.

The ground [i]hates me.[/i] It is, like me, a thing that devours - but it does not consume, and it does not seek out. It lies in wait, and what it takes, it hoards forever. I think that’s why it hates me. We are just similar enough to resent our differences. And so there, buried alive, I felt the very earth start to weigh down on me, to pull me down deeper and deeper, to squeeze and crush my limbs. The worms, the roots - they were gone. There was only the soil, dark and writhing and packing itself tighter and tighter. Like a great fist of clay closing in on me and savouring the vicious joy of pulling me down... And for all my power, my own hunger is no match for that of a planet. I think I would still be down there, alive and forever bound, if I hadn’t needed James to do the shoveling, and if he hadn’t realized something was even more wrong than my already-strange request to be buried alive.

I suppose he might have come to you afterwards. His statement about his strange experience with an acquaintance asking to be buried alive might be in your archives, if I hadn’t… Well. I was in a somewhat wretched state. I regretted it afterwards, for what it’s worth, but he truly did taste amazing.

What I miss most since the burial is the spelunking. I liked the exploration, the sense of wonder, and there is no better way to have a nice, relaxed meal than down in caves where your companions are almost completely blind and far from anyone who could hear them. 

So I eat people. Everyone needs a hobby. Actually that’s a good word - hobby. It turns out I don’t actually _need_ to eat. I starved myself one time - I mean it when I say ‘anything once’ - and it was… fine. I went for a month without feeling any physical symptoms of real hunger. It was just… incredibly boring. And when I get bored, things start going awry. For me, and for everyone else. 

I feel like I might be misleading you. I mean that I was starving myself entirely, not just of, ah, the finest meat. If I ate a man a month, I would probably have drawn more scrutiny than I have. Not only am I careful, but I have… eclectic tastes, and I was able to distract myself with plenty of other experiences. Kayaking was especially nice. The problem isn’t not eating, it’s understimulation. It is one of the few pains that I don’t enjoy. I suppose that’s why I avoid going underground now. The thought of being trapped forever, with no hope of sensation, is worse than all fates I can imagine save one. 

They say you should start at the beginning, but I can’t. My memories of the time before my existence are dream-like, and the first few years of my life on this earth are a blur of sensations, so rooted in physical discovery as to make it impossible to recall what I thought, what I saw, what I said. I suppose the thing that gnaws at me is that I might never know if my transformation was a _fall_ , or a _triumph_.

There are… things, outside this world. Outside these parameters of existence. Things that hover at the edge of your minds and perception, snaking their tendrils into reality. They can act upon this world, through proxies, but can’t enter it in full, because the concept of ‘entering’ supposes an, ah, integrity of being that they lack. 

That’s what I was, I think. I don’t know if I am the last aspect of an entity that has now vanished, leaving me cut off from my source. I think - I fancy, rather - that I _was_ that entity. That something vast and fathomless and alien managed to squeeze its way into the world and to contain itself wholly within a single shape. And this shape is me. 

I… crave. That is what defines me. I crave feeling on the physical level. I am not a boor, but the pursuits of the mind are not nearly as interesting to me as those of the body. My existence upon this earth is shaped by this craving. My first dance… My first skydiving outing… My first taste of alcohol… My first slice of marinated pork… My first bite of a ripe peach.

The first time I held my hand to a flame. The first time I threw myself off a cliff without gear. 

I shouldn’t emphasize ‘first time’ so much. I do crave novelty, but it is impossible to grow bored with the full range of human experience, even as you repeat them time and again.

And of course, there’s the first time I partook of human flesh. 

I do not mean to disturb you overmuch, so I will elude the grittier details. Just know that when I tell you the true meat is _everything_ , I do not mean simply that its flavor is beyond compare, though it is. I mean that when I consume it, I partake of everything that person was. I taste every bite of every meal they’ve ever had. I taste every blow they struck and received. I taste their first kiss and their first papercut. There is nothing like it.

So though I crave, though I am squeezed into this shape, do not think of it as a prison of flesh. I am quite content.

…

Is there anyone monitoring this? Hey. Hey! You, in the other room. Yes, you. I am sorry to bother you, but might I please have a glass of water? My throat is quite parched. 

Yes, I’ll wait. Thank you very much.

…

Sorry for that. I… 

I’m not sure why I am taking so, ah, conversational a tone, actually. After all, there is nobody sitting in this chair opposite the table. I am talking into a blind, dumb device, and yet.

...ah. Yes, of course, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? Even a tape recorder, branded with the right touch, would feel like a per-

Ah, yes, thank you. This is most appreciated. 

…

Some people say water doesn’t have a taste. This makes my mind boggle every time. Do they just… drink distilled water exclusively? And if so, for what maddening reason? The flavor of the tap water from two different _counties_ differs more wildly than that of bananas or pork meat from two points half the world apart, let alone proper, bottled spring water from two different brands.

The best-tasting water is - I am sorry if this offends your sensibilities - better than all but the finest tea, and the worst is like drinking copper syrup. 

This particular water is… chalky. An acquired taste, but one I don’t mind. 

I should tell you about the dreams. 

They’re infrequent, but awful every time. In my dreams I am vast beyond measure. I stretch out far beyond this atmosphere, my consciousness spanning the whole of my shapeless existence. I can with a single thought move from the surface of the sun to the craters of Pluto. I can surround the entire Earth in my bodiless thought, observing all things at once.

And the earth stares back, mocking me. Because for all that I am infinite and limitless and free of all constraints I am also _nothing_. I cannot touch or eat or cut or squeeze or kiss or bite or sleep or hurt or-

I can’t. I can’t... _anything_. All I can do is rage and scream and hurl myself at this ball of rock that is all that has ever mattered and will ever matter, and in the force of my want let my craving seep through its crack and awaken into some of its puny little denizens some reflection of myself. They are like the tiniest termite holes in a wooden wall and I must push myself as close as I can to hope to glimpse through them something, anything, of what lies beyond.

This is the only fate I fear more than to be entombed for all eternity. 

I will tell you one last thing, before I leave. It’s the reason I came here in the first place. 

It’s the first time I met one of my… our, I suppose, kind.

It was the height of summer and the mood was to partying. I was walking along the coast, going from bonfire to bonfire. Young people, college students, even high-schoolers, they’d piled up some old crates and kindling and set them apart, and a mile or two apart you’d come across a new fire, a new group, a new celebration. I went from one to the other - some had the good drugs, and some had the good booze, and some had just the right choice of music, the right level of tippiness, the right blend of humor, that I could lose myself into their little crowd, be like their friend for an hour, and dance the night away. Every trek between beaches let me refresh my mind and body in the cool air, and every bonfire warmed my bones back up and let the fumes of celebration work their way from my chest to my brain and send me into a haze.

It was late when I finally came upon the creek, and I’d imbibed enough intoxicants that it took me some time to work out what I saw. I was a little ways above them, standing between a few trees, looking down at a grey sand beach, framed by rocks almost like an amphitheatre. The sand was well-trod with footsteps, and gravel and rocks had been moved out of the way to make room for both the central fire and the… furniture. 

The bonfire itself was the biggest I’d seen that entire year, and it wasn’t just old crates and leftover wooden planks. It was fine firewood, well-cut, which wouldn’t really matter that much to a big old pyre; it was as if these people had treated the idea of using quality fuel as inherently worthwhile regardless of whether or not they themselves could tell the difference. The strangest thing, though, where the spikes. Four, long metal poles, sharpened at the end, stuck out in all four directions. They were inclined at an angle such that a person standing up might be able to touch the tip, and long enough that their base was buried deep within the wooden pile. 

The bonfire was already roaring by the time I’d arrived. It blazed up to the sky, golden red, and the smell of good dry wood was so fragrant in the air I felt the sudden urge to roast some meat above the open flame. I took a step forward, though I nearly stumbled and had to catch myself before I fell face-down in the sand. 

By that point I had drawn the attention of the celebrants. I… couldn’t possibly tell you how many there were. Most of them slid off my mind, like extras in the background of a movie. Their eyes had a certain… hollowness to them. I remember thinking it was as if they were shadows of real people cast by the pyre, or if perhaps they had been hollowed out, some vital fuel within them long burned out. They said nothing as I approached.

The man at their head, though, was something different. He turned from the flame to stare at me, and his eyes were like embers, bright and feverish. He took a step forward and pulled down his hood, and I had the strangest thought… That this hoodie he wore, this simple sweater, was his concession to the fact that a man today could not simply walk around in the thick robes of some ancient priest of a shadowy cult.

So he wore a hoodie instead. They all did. The same red-and-gold hooded sweater, all of them. 

I think that first touch of oddness is what opened me to notice the other two things that finally pulled me out of my drug-and-booze-induced trance. 

First were the sacrifices. I mean, at that point I hadn’t come to any conscious conclusion, but they were three people, without hoodies, huddled in a corner of the beach with a terrified look on their face, and they were all in their early-twenties and with just enough of a haggard look in their faces to tell me that they were starting to wake up from the mundane intoxication that had made them easy prey to draw away from the other bonfire parties happening that night.

I should know, I had done the exact same thing the exact same way before. And these terrified young people were there next to a gigantic bonfire and hollow-eyed people all wearing hoods. So my mind reflexively, instinctively labelled them ‘sacrifices.’

(It didn’t strike me as odd, at that time, that there were four iron spikes but only three sacrifices.) 

The second was the marshmallow smell. 

I’ve met fanatics, cultists, before. Oftentimes they ascribe deep solemnity to the most trite thing in a desperate attempt to make their ridiculous little group of twelve weirdos obsessed with the color of a chicken’s feather or what not, to make it feel more ponderous and respectable to themselves. But at the same time, people are people. And even for some hollow-eyed shadow of a man, waiting to burn some college students alive, building a bonfire this big - especially if all the wood hadn’t been cut ahead of time - would take a long time. And not everyone might be contributing to the labor at any given time.

So they’d made smaller fires and roasted marshmallows while waiting for the drudgery to be over. I could still see the charred sticks stuck vertically in the sand, and smell the toasted candy on the air. It made my mouth water.

This - the sudden return of the craving, the faint absurdity of a human sacrifice ritual involving roasted marshmallows, sheer boredom, and hoodies - finally let me shrug off the last shreds of my fugue-like state. I straightened up and put my hands in the pockets of my coat, smiling. 

The leader of the group returned that smile a fraction of an inch wider, a fraction of a scowl _meaner_ , and I knew. 

Something here was very, very right. 

I should have been thinking the opposite, of course. I should have been thinking something was very _wrong_. But I couldn’t. Because when I saw this man, with his short-cropped blond hair, his round features, his burning eyes. When I saw the way the flames wreathed his back, making the red and gold of his hoodie dance like molten lava over his body, and when I saw the way his shadow laughed while he stayed still, and when I looked past this and saw that there were yet beads of sweat on his forehead and the faded pink of a burn mark on the left side of his chin, I knew two things.

One was that his existence offended me on a level deeper than anything I had ever met before, save for these dreadful minutes I’d spent buried alive. This man represented something as deeply outrageous to me as I did to the hungry, hoarding ground. I knew as I saw him that the likes of _him_ would never condescend to something as low as to _eat_ the flesh they were about to burn. No, making any use of their sacrifices, allowing themselves to enjoy and profit from the fruit of their worship was beneath them.

The wastefulness was the point. 

The second thing was that… 

I was going to eat him. He meant nothing to me. Though he had been spawned from a wildfire that could turn the world to cinder and end all life and bury the rocks in ash, he himself was a mere spark. 

My thin smile turned into a wide, toothy grin, and I said:

“I am going to impale your body on this iron spike and roast you alive, and then I shall eat you.”

At this, he seemed briefly taken aback. Then he burst into cackling laughter.

His fellow cultists said nothing, did not react. They watched, calm, patient, soulless. The sacrifices had long left my awareness. I saw only this little spark of a man, and I desired nothing more than to consume his whole, entire being. 

He reached down, pulling a charred wooden stick out of the ground. I suppose he was about to call upon the power of the flame in some way. It didn’t really matter. I grinned wider and toothier. Then I grinned much, much wider, and much, much toothier, and he froze, his hand halfway to the bonfire, staring at my wide, wide, wide drooling mouth.

I took a step and was there, seizing him by the front of his sweater and hoisting him up in the air with one hand. The iron spike was right there. It was all too easy. I shoved him down its length, the sharpened metal tearing horribly through cotton and flesh and a couple of ribs. He gasped soundlessly, eyes wide open at the sky, his expression one of surprise and distance. His arm fell limp, dropping the stick into the pyre.

I stepped back, tongue lolling out, watching my handiwork. The fire took him so easily, like a bundle of paper, his hoodie gone in moments. He twitched, eyes glassy, yet found the strength to bring his hands up to the metal rod that jutted out of his torso. He grasped it, to what purpose I could not care to guess at; I was staring at the wide, jagged wound through which blood was starting to pour out… 

Except to my surprise it wasn’t blood. There was something running down the length of the spike and dripping into the flame but it wasn’t even red. For a brief moment I thought of clear wax, and then it hit the burning logs and I heard the sizzle and the smell made my chest suddenly feel hollow and aching.

It was fat. He was bleeding boiling, sizzling, fragrant fat. 

His lips twitched, and with little spasms, little tugs, his hands began pulling his body forwards along the metal rod. His skin was burning, peeling to ash, and everywhere it revealed the meat beneath there was no blood, just more fat. I couldn’t move, transfixed as I was by the sight of the cultist cooking alive, by the smell of toasted bread and searing lard and roasting pork. 

Finally he managed to pull himself off the spike, falling heavily to the ground. By then his hair was gone, as was most of the skin of his face, but what was revealed underneath was not charred flesh or a burned skull. It was more skin, so very, very pink, on which was rapidly growing a thin down of blond fur. 

The cartilage of his nose melted off, and a snout pushed through the skin. His hands fell apart, skin like little pieces of burning paper, and out pushed two thin, long, long arms with a leathery hide. 

He grabbed me by the throat with one hand and by the arm with the other, and I screamed. His long, twisted fingers dug into my clothes and skin, searing his handprints into me. The hole in his torso was still there but no longer dripping oil, cauterized. As his snout parted and the tiny little embers of his eyes stared hatred and triumph into my skull, I understood what I was fighting.

I had done this. Three sacrifices, four iron spikes. The abducted youths were the side-dish, the hors d’oeuvre. He was the piece de resistance. And I had set him to roast instead of simply tearing his head off. 

The point of the ritual was to burn him in offering and recast him into a new and greater shape. 

What stretched above me with its narrow torso and long slender legs and bizarre sharp-jointed arms was a very, very _long_ **_pig_ **.

I think he thought I was what he’d been earlier. A mere man endowed with a twisted, flesh-warped blessing, a mouth with which to consume, instead of the glorious horror he’d become. He couldn’t have known, I suppose. I didn’t either. I’d never had cause to strain myself fighting another living being. Shackles are a very passive opponent, and my human prey most often felt like tissue paper for me to rip apart. I had never known what would happen if I had to _try_.

His hand burned where it touched, sinking into my upper arm as if through soft dough, cooking it as it went. The skin peeled off, flying off into cinder. The muscle scorched to hard black coal. He thought, I assume, that he would soon hit bone.

Instead he saw the bright candy-pink of gum - no, I don’t mean bubblegum. I mean gum, as in the white ivory spires that stretched out from what was underneath all that meat were very, very large teeth.

He didn’t have much time for surprise before the pain came. A boneless jaw of teeth and gum coiled around his arm, wrapping it up entirely, and then it squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. Leathery skin split, and bone shattered, and my arm [i]drank[/i] his. 

He let go of my throat, howling - no, oinking. Staggered a few steps back.

As I rose from my knees, my other arm was bulging grotesquely. My shoulder bloated into a tumorous growth, and more and more followed, like grapes of hideous bloated skin. 

But they were not tumors. They were stomachs. I needed more space with which to digest this choicest of meats. So I opened my mouth, and because it wasn’t enough I opened my throat, and because it wasn’t enough I opened my ribcage, and I bore down on the terrified little piglet.

First I drank his voice. Then I inhaled his flame. Then finally I closed my maw on his flesh. It is hard to describe how it felt to consume an entity so fundamentally opposed to myself to someone who presumably lacks the same senses as I do. Perhaps… Hard liquor? It burns your throat the whole way down, and it makes you cough and gag, and yet from the very first gulp it heats up your brain and makes you dizzy with strength and excitement. 

I was losing myself, quickly. By the time I had consumed him I was dimly aware of the dozens of lashing tongues with which I had seized the hollow-eyed cultists, pulling them one by one, screaming or weeping, into my new cancerous mouths and my many stomachs. My jaw-limb whipped about, scattering the bonfire erected in honor of my foe. I stretched out my gloriously hideous shape twenty feet into the sky. 

I think the sacrifices might have escaped. I couldn’t tell you for sure, but unlike the cultists,, they meant nothing to my gluttonous mind. You might want to track them down, if you do follow-ups to these things. 

By the time I only held one wriggling, demented cultist up to my face I was becoming aware of just how much I had changed and of the fact that I was _still growing_. Still stretching. Still bloating. But it wasn’t all.

I no longer felt the stinging, wakening pain of fire as I swept the bonfire. I no longer felt any taste from the men I devoured beyond ash and dust. I no longer felt strong in this terrible body, only cramped, aching to stretch more, to grow further. The fire I had consumed burned in my belly and told me to seek out more and more, but I couldn’t, not for very long.

The air around me buckled and cracked with the weight of my existence. This world would soon no longer be able to withstand me.

I realized with utter terror that I was ascending.

I did the only thing I could then. I tossed the last cultist aside, and then shoved several of my own limbs down my throat whose dimension defied space and physics. I retched, puked out first a charred skeleton, and then vomited fire and grey ash and burnt wood and seared flesh. It all spilled out, spooled around the skeleton as it writhed, screamed in silence.

Then I was empty enough that I could no longer sustain my new shape, and I began to collapse on myself, shrinking, deflating, until I fell to my knees and passed out, naked as a babe.

…

So in the end I guess I must explain why exactly I elected to come here and tell you this story. There are two reasons.

The first is that I kind of… feel bad, you know? I won’t pretend I don’t do things you probably think are ‘evil,’ and I won’t pretend that I care. But I usually only harm others to the extent that it benefits me, and now as a consequence of my actions there is a man of cinder running around the countryside. A servant of the flame so utterly consumed he is now a thing of ash, perpetually cold. He will seek a way to ignite himself back to his former glory, and that will probably involve hurting a lot of people. So, here’s my free tip: maybe keep an eye out for that guy. 

The second reason is the foremost one, if I am honest. 

There is something coming, and it is great and terrible and beautiful and horrid. Things beyond the world, reaching down, poking their fingers through the skein of reality, blindly groping about in an attempt to change the rules of our game. And I get them. I mean - I got there long before they did, even if I don’t remember how, and I wouldn’t go back for anything. 

Hopefully.

But when the time comes for cities to burn and streets to run red with blood, the aspects and proxies of these entities will surely stumble upon me as I try to make my way through life enjoying its creature comforts. And they will think me a threat, a rival, even if I couldn’t challenge them if I wanted to, which I don’t.

If I’m lucky, the ones who find me and decide to take me out of the game will only mean to kill me. I have made my peace with dying. It was a good run.

If I’m unlucky… Well. There are many fates worse than death when such things as we are involved. Some, I would still prefer to the final alternative. But I don’t know how much choice I will get. I didn’t have that much control over myself when some upstart pawn in the great chess match tried to burn me alive.

If the worst happens to me, I would like for there to remain a record of my existence and my final wishes. Even if it’s only one tape in a dusty old archive, never listened to.

This is my final statement:

I would rather die than become a god.

…

Okay, how do you turn that thing off. Miss? Miiiisss? 

[CLICK]

Statement ends.

The more of these… caveats and nuances appear in our record, the more I begin to think Robert Smirke made up in enthusiasm what he liked in… accuracy. Some men, especially wealthy, well-educated Victorian men, suffer from a disease of the mind that makes it so when the world refuses to fit into the elegant system they have designed to explain it, then it is the world that is wrong, and not the system.

‘Mr Piglet’ is easy enough, I suppose. Fire, the sacrifice of young people with their lives ahead of them, the servant having to immolate himself alongside them, the crucible-like transformation into a more powerful, less human body, all speak of the Desolation. At the same time this is the first time I encounter it in such a _meaty_ form. The rather literal transformation of a human being into ‘long pig’ speaks more of the surreal nightmare touch of the Flesh. A power borrowing an aesthetic, perhaps.

Mr ‘Kutry’ is harder to explain. The possibility of a fifteenth power which long ago did the impossible and managed to make itself exist bodily in our world, severely diminishing itself in the process, seems rather far-fetched. What then? A servant, an avatar of some sort, perhaps cut off from its patron? The idea would be of obvious interest to me, were it not for the fact that Mr Kutry’s alleged freedom did not make him any less inclined to go about murdering people. And then, which one? The Hunt? The Flesh? 

I have come to reflect more on Gerry’s color model. The powers are, at most, ‘poles,’ around which exist a vast blur where goals, aesthetics, and means flow, combine and split off. Mr Kutry, I suspect, once found his place within this blur, and now he finds it among us.

There is something ironic, I think, about an entity that is fear in turn fearing its own divinity.

Oh, one last thing. Attached to the tape was a paper file. A police report regarding a break-in at a foundry near Manchester. Locks roughly punched through, and a trail of black ash leading to one perpetually burning furnace. Not, eventually, judged worth halting the enormous operations - but ever since, something has been dampening the heat output of the furnace. Like a tick sapping at the flow of flame.

What was it Frost wrote?

_Some say the world will end in fire,_

_Some say in ice._

_From what I’ve tasted of desire_

_I hold with those who favor fire._

_But if it had to perish twice,_

_I think I know enough of hate_

_To say that for destruction ice_

_Is also great_

_And would suffice._

I suppose in the end our ‘man of cinder’ found an eternity of hellfire preferable to the cold.

End recording.

[CLICK] 

  
  



End file.
